#250622 ~ On Performance, On Politics, On Theatrical Possibility
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for June 22, 2025
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my emphatically intermittent newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreCliquery:
This installment of #TheatreClique links to a remarkably rich constellation of pieces that evince the connections between performance and politics. (My reflections on four aesthetically-adventurous productions follow.) But for this week’s opener, I lift a delicious mini-documentary from Artifacts, “a new online video platform exploring the avant-garde, the arts, and queer culture,” that comes from their GenderBender series (which highlights “groundbreaking icons, bending and transcending the boundaries of traditional gender and identity narratives”). Now. Gird your loins and ready yourself to re/encounter a legendary downtown performance artist with whom I am not-so-mildly obsessed… the one… the only… the otherworldly… THE Mario Montez (1935-2013)! and if clicking the image below routes to an error message, try clicking here.
EDITOR’S NOTE: whenever possible, whenever linking to paywalled pieces, I try to “gift” the article to #TheatreClique readers. In other words, clicking out to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal should neither present hassle nor burn through your current allotment of free views. Here’s hoping more outlets — hello LATimes! hi NewYorkMagazine! yo NewYorker!— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon...— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon...
#NowClickThis…
Wherein I highlight a handful of the most click-worthy links I’ve encountered in the last few…
at American Theatre, writer/editors Gabriela Furtado Coutinho and Kelundra Smith join forces (and run some numbers) to craft a richly evocative assessment of what has — and has not — changed in the five years since the 2020 release of the manifesto We See You White American Theatre;
at his reliably fascinating Jacques newsletter, theatre journalist Gordon Cox parses the likely impacts of the most recent round federal travel bans for organizations/producers committed to programming international artists to perform for US-based audiences;
The New York Times’s Laura Collins-Hughes reports on the experience of acting up as an audience-participant in David Wise’s immersive theater experiment Fight Back, in which audience-members “become” the activists at a 1989 meeting of ACT-UP;
at Queerty, actor/writer Marval Rex reflects on being a trans actor in a country that is “that is both obsessed with you and wants you to disappear”;
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik reflects on “what Trump missed at the Kennedy Center production of Les Mis”;
at The Point, writer/editor Alexandra Tanner digs into the work of Nathan Fielder and the rise of auto-performance;
at Interview, freelance arts writer Douglas Corzine talks to “part oracle, part jester, part chaos agent” Julia Masli about her “strange, soulful show” HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, which offers “the absurd as its own kind of medicine”;
The Washington Post’s Joe Heim reports on the unexpected appearance of a new “Dictator Approved” sculpture on Washington DC’s National Mall;
Variety’s Chris Willman explains the controversy stirred by Latin-R&B singer Nezza’s decision to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” in Spanish (using a translation commissioned by FDR during the Good Neighbor era) at Dodgers Stadium;
and at The Advocate, journalist Bernardo Sim talks to iconic drag king Murray Hill about his new show — the new reality/competition series King of Drag — teaser below — which begins streaming on Revry today!
Thoughts from That One “Critic” Who Likes Everything:
Wherein I offer capsule reviews of what I liked best — my HIGH-LIKES if you will — about the shows I’ve recently engaged...
#78: Small Ball
Book and Lyrics by Mickle Maher; Music by Merel van Dijk & Anthony Barilla • Directed by Taibi Magar & Tyler Dobrowsky • Philadelphia • Philadelphia Theater Company • June 2025.
At some point during my encounter with the (literally) extraordinary new musical Small Ball, I thought “I bet this is what Shrek the Musical would have looked like if María Irene Fornés and Philip Glass had gotten the gig…” Marvelously weird, defiantly experimental, often perplexing, and occasionally just inscrutable, Small Ball takes the story of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels out of its “late colonial” setting (at the end the Age of Discovery) and plops it smack inside the day-after-tomorrow dystopia of “late capitalism” at the ostensible edge of the Age of Mediatization. And then, just for fun, Small Ball adds lots of songs, a somewhat Seussian sensibility, and a hefty dash of basketball lore. The resulting concoction can be dizzying (especially when trying to track the satiric/sardonic critiques that most animate the piece) but the performing ensemble is a delight — especially the diabolically funny Adam Chanler-Berat (who manifests a musical villain for the ages); the clarion vocals of Jordan Dobson (who beautifully captures the oblique melodiousness of the ambitious score); and Philly treasure Sarah Gliko (whose preternatural instinct for finding the perfect tuning note for a production’s theatrical style is always a wonder to behold). A bold, ambitious, and welcome experiment in what a forward-thinking contemporary “musical comedy” can be.
See also:
Philadelphia Inquirer sports journalist Gina Mizell peeks in on the “deliciously weird” musical Small Ball produced by Philadelphia 76ers’s General Manager Daryl Morey;
PhillyVoice’s Michaela Althouse details how the creative team built Small World’s High School Musical meets The Borrowers meets a fever dream theatrical reality.
#79: A Summer Day
By Jon Fosse; translated Sarah Cameron Sunde • Directed by Yury Urnov • Philadelphia • The Wilma Theater • June 2025.
Yuri Urnov’s gobsmacking wonder of a production stands as my introduction to the theatrical potency of Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse’s dramatic work. Fosse is not only Norway’s most consequential playwright since Ibsen, but also one of the most widely produced playwrights across Europe. Yet Fosse’s sometimes discomfitingly spare and enigmatic dramaturgy has not yet found comparable anglophonic pickup in the US or the UK. Enter The Wilma, building a possible bridge to that gap. In A Summer Day, we encounter a woman frozen in the free fall of grief as she revisits her memory of the day her beloved disappeared into the lake. The play’s many recursive repetitions function both as balm — something to occupy the devastating silence — and as incantation — a fragile tether between what seemed knowable then and what is emphatically unknowable now. The play’s dramatic action traverses the irresolvable tension of these suspended emotions. And that’s it. Even as it is also almost too much. To activate the theatricality of Fosse’s delicate play, the Wilma production deploys expert actors — notably, the deftly specific Krista Apple in the central role and, as her remembered beloved, the reliably captivating Jaime Maseda —in tandem with perhaps the most exhilarating stage design I’ve experienced this decade. (Misha Kachman’s scenic work effects a coup de théâtre I will not soon forget and Michael Kiley’s sound echoes in my mind’s ear still.) Quite simply a gift of a production. A pro-shot video capture of Wilma’s production of A Summer Day will be available to stream July 7-27, 2025.
See also:
at Broad Street Review, freelance theatre critic/journalist Cameron Kelsall celebrates The Wilma’s A Summer Day as “a finely wrought endeavor” that powerfully captures the “spare and devastating” resonance of Fosse’s “exquisite miniatures”;
at The Philadelphia Inquirer, freelance arts writer/dramaturg Alix Rosenfield wonders about the emotional resonance of Fosse’s “soft and somber” naturalist repetitions.
#80: Chiaroscuro
By Aishah Rahman • Directed by abigail jean-batiste • NYC • National Black Theatre at TheFlea • June 2025.
The subtitle of Aishah Rahman’s 2002 play Chiaroscuro is A Light and Dark Skin Comedy. That sequence of seemingly simple words — light, dark, skin, comedy — are the complex variables that instigate Chiaroscuro’s many looping riffs, refrains, and ruminations on how the harms of privilege play through the lives of Black women and men. Ostensibly set on a “singles cruise” that is hosted by Paul Paul Legba (a manifestation of the West African trickster/guardian spirit, embodied here by Paige Gilbert), abigail jean-baptiste’s production surrounds the proceeding with black mirrors (in the reflective gloss black floor, at each end of the alley stage), evoking both the vast depths traversed by ocean passage and the irreality of the tv show of the same name. For in both Rahman’s mind-bending play and jean-baptiste’s eye-popping production, nothing — certainly not history, not identity, not intimacy — is ever simply as it seems. Chiaroscuro’s cast is uniformly excellent, but Ebony Marshall-Oliver’s vocal and emotional nuance as the visually ghoulish Gina Rose makes the play’s climactic reveal even more resonant for me. A boldly adventurous production of one of the most boldly adventurous playwrights of the late twentieth century.
See also:
Playbill’s Margaret Hall talks to director abigail jean-baptiste PU’18 about “what it means to stage [Aishah] Rahman’s work in 2025” and “the continued importance" of institutions like [National Black Theater]”;
at Stage and Cinema, theatremaker/critic Kevin Vavasseur evinces the “rigorous, demanding journey and “unabashed theatricality” of Rahman’s Chiaroscuro.
#81: Bowl EP
Written and directed by Nazareth Hassan; original music by Free Fool • NYC • Vineyard Theatre with National Black Theatre & The New Group • June 2025.
Nazareth Hassan writes and directs Bowl EP, a genre-busting reverent reverie of a production that plumbs the im/possibilities of young/Black/queer/masc/femme love. The set is an empty swimming pool, where Quentavius (the vividly alive Oghenero Gbaje) and Kelly (Essence Lotus, whose skill at turning a line is next level) meet up for a time. Both actors serve luminous characterizations — somehow palpably real and vividly theatrical — while also being a new kind of triple threat (“must be able to act, rap, and skateboard effortlessly”). The pair meetup regularly, ostensibly to chart the tracks of what they dream will be their breakthrough rap album, while also skateboarding, getting stoned, and flirting their way to the threshold of love. That’s when Quentavius’s demon — or, perhaps more precisely, “Intimacy Poltergeist” — Lemon Pepper Chicken (Kalhonjee Gallimore at the performance I saw) bursts through the pool floor to manifest the pair’s deepest superstar dreams and bloodiest secret nightmares. (Bowl EP strikes me as what might happen if A24 started producing theatre… which, frankly, I think would be amazing.) Special highlikes for the wry, dazzling, and dramaturgically essential projection design by Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor and the electrifying intimacy/fight choreography by Teniece Divya Johnson. In sum, a visionary piece of theatremaking animated by luminous performances and expert technical artistry — an auspicious arrival for Nazareth Hassan.
See also:
Theatrely’s Joey Sims celebrates Bowl EP as an “abstract tragicomedy and rap elegy for lost love” and for its “powerful announcement of a new talent in [Nazareth] Hassan”;
at Gay City News, veteran theatre critic Christopher Byrne hails Bowl EP as “a triumph…that manages to be daring, provocative and heartwarming all at once.”